Every day I experience life in the world of healthcare IT, supporting 3000 doctors, 18000 faculty, and 3 million patients. In this blog I record my experiences with infrastructure, applications, policies, management, and governance as well as muse on such topics such as reducing our carbon footprint, standardizing data in healthcare, and living life to its fullest.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

2009 New Year's resolutions

2009 will be a challenging year as budgets are constrained, a new administration is launched, and more demands are placed on IT to help stakeholders work more efficiently.

Here are my goals for 2009.

BIDMC1. I will continue to evolve cloud computing offerings in 2009, including the rollout of a new storage design, offering generous amounts of low cost space for clinical care, email, and research.2. I will continue the rollouts of software as a service EHRs for our community providers including connectivity to the MAeHC quality warehouse, the MA-Share healthcare information exchange, and Google Health/Microsoft Healthvault.3. I will work collaboratively with all our corporate communications, clinical, and administrative stakeholders to launch a new intranet that includes many social networking features.4. I will support the Federal and State economic stimulus activities for Healthcare IT.

HMS1. I will work with Public Affairs, research, and administrative leaders to redesign and unify the external web presence at Harvard Medical School, which today has many disparate websites with heterogeneous navigation and search.2. I will work with administrative stakeholders to implement a next generation of web-based workflow tools which improve efficiency by automating document management, routing, and communication.3. As with BIDMC, I will evolve my cloud computing offerings for storage (high performance, mid-tier, archive) and implement the first pilots of our New England Biocomputing Center.4. I will support the Federal and State economic stimulus activities for Healthcare IT.

MA-Share/NEHENI've listed these two organizations together because my goal is to ensure a successful merger of these two complementary organizations in 2009, creating a single statewide health information exchange for all types of data among all stakeholders. The combined organization will work with all the other great ehealth organizations in Massachusetts to support the Federal and State economic stimulus activities for Healthcare IT.

HITSPBy charter, which limits me to two terms, I must hand off the HITSP chairmanship on October 1, 2009. What will I focus on for these next 10 months?

1. I will work with all stakeholders to ensure we have all the standards we need for exchange of clinical summaries, both simple and complex, that meet all the data exchange requirements of EHRs and PHRs.2. I will work with all stakeholders to move HITSP interoperability specifications to a service oriented architecture, making implementation much easier, such as conforming to a published WSDL3. I will work with HITSP teams to develop a data dictionary for interoperability, making it easy for an implementer to locate all the standards they need for specific data elements. I will work with all the CEOs of EHR vendors and CCHIT to ensure we reduce their barriers to standards implementation.4. I will support the Federal and State economic stimulus activities for Healthcare IT.